Teach the Free Man: Stories [Hardcover]

Peter Nathaniel Malae (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2007

The twelve stories in Teach the Free Man mark the impressive debut of Peter Nathaniel Malae. The subject of incarceration thematically links the stories, yet their range extends beyond the prison’s barbed wire and iron bars. Avoiding sensationalism, Malae exposes the heart and soul in those dark, seemingly inaccessible corridors of the human experience.

The stories, often raw and startlingly honest, are distinguished by the colloquial voices of California’s prison inmates, who, despite their physical and cultural isolation, confront dilemmas with which we can all identify: the choice to show courage against peer pressure; the search for individual rights within a bureaucracy; and the desperate desire for honor in the face of great sacrifice. These stories present polished and poetic examples of finding something redemptive in the least among us.

The book’s epigraph by W. H. Auden, from which the book takes its title, exemplifies the spirit of these dynamic stories:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The consequences of crime and violence govern Malae's debut collection, in which conflicts frequently come to brutal resolutions. The characters, whose lives revolve around California prisons, primarily focus on survival. Yet, as the narrator of "The Story" realizes while he watches his son go through the system, "survival always has a price, even if you can't see it." "Reliable Vet Dad, Reliable Con Son" recounts how a prisoner channels his father's Vietnam experience to help him hack San Quentin. In "Turning Point" an ex-con learns that life outside prison can be just as dangerous as life inside. At his best, Malae incorporates colloquial language into gripping, tension-filled episodes to reveal the inner workings of a complicated social structure: In "Before High Desert," a young criminal named Ya Ya struggles to fit into the prison hierarchy, while in "Tags," a Samoan inmate is willing to sell out his Samoan friend to maintain the order of his gang. At times Malae's plots are short on clarity and suffer from repetition, while judgments about his characters lack subtlety. Still, in his vivid depictions of incarcerated life and his development of believable voices, Malae shows promise. (Mar.)
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Review

“Most of the characters in Peter Malae’s Teach the Free Man have managed to mismanage their lives, but what counts here is that Malae handles their voices so that their language—the slang, the jargon, the argot—rings true and draws us wholly into their hard luck, often violent, worlds. These are stories from borders of society and we need to thanks Mr. Malae for delivering them to us.”
—Darrell Spencer, author of Bring Your Legs with You

“Peter Malae is the real deal. He's like a young Nelson Algren or Richard Wright, one of those writers who can hit with both hands. And his book is more than an auspicious debut; it's as good a collection of stories as I've read in years.”
—Russell Banks

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Swallow Press; 1 edition (April 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804010986
• ISBN-13: 978-0804010986
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,759,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of the novel, What We Are (2010), a New York Times Editor's Choice and finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the story collection, Teach the Free Man (2007), a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the Glasgow Prize. He has won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation/Intersection for the Arts, the Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship for Fiction and a John Steinbeck Fellowship. In 2012, Grove will publish his next book, an epic novel about the dissolution of an American family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Courageous, Outstanding, and Masterful Fiction, September 2, 2007

By 

Michael Disend - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Teach the Free Man: Stories (Hardcover)

I can't praise Teach the Free Man enough. This is the most powerful book of short stories I've read in decades. I'm hugely inspired! Peter Malae is a courageous young writer of an order I'd forlornly thought had vanished forever from American literature. Like Hugo, Dickens, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevsky (writers with whom Malae is safely and correctly compared), he understands at core creative level that each sentence, each incident, each word of one's "fiction" -- if it is to be spiritually and artistically authentic -- must be forged in the white-hot oven of one's own heart. Malae bravely does this in every story of the collection, bar none! It's astonishing. Not once did I sense laziness or falsity. Graduate and survivor of the American Gulag, Malae takes us to horrifying intersections where almost every character, con and guard alike, is embroiled in an excruciating conflict that has separated them from his or her inner truth. That these white-hot stories -- violent, sagely, and often demonic -- take place in California's maximum security prisons is, in a sense, almost redundant. Malae doesn't depend on the hellishness of American prisons to make his points and discoveries: he plunges straight down into the heart like an incandescent dagger, right into envy, jealousy, hatred, revenge, grief, pity, feelings of blame and self-pity that are rendered with a master's touch. Scarlet feelings splash over us and scorch our conscience. These stories are not only authentic literature of the first rank, they are socially rebellious and instructive in the same way Dickens intended his fiction to be: illuminating yet in no way didactic. If you were blind to the wickedness and dehumanzation of the American penal institution, if you had doubts about the need to reform it totally, this book will wake you up fast. In my estimation Peter Malae transcends Bunker, Abbot, and others to whom he could be facilely compared because he's a significantly deeper artist. Peter Nathaniel Malae, it seems to me, is a young Victor Hugo and, if American literature is to graduate from its current infantilism, narcissism, and irrelevance, we should be thankful that he has appeared. I closed the book with a feeling of Cosmic Clarity for which I am deeply grateful. I can offer no greater acknowledgment.